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vossman77 writes: 'According to the Chicago Tribune, "Lego will produce a limited-edition box set called Research Institute, featuring three female scientists in the act of learning more about our world and beyond." The concept received 10,000 supporters on the LEGO ideas site. Creator Ellen Kooijman writes in a blog post, "As a female scientist I had noticed two things about the available Lego sets: a skewed male/female minifigure ratio and a rather stereotypical representation of the available female figures. It seemed logical that I would suggest a small set of female mini-figures in interesting professions to make our Lego city communities more diverse." LEGO says, "The final design, pricing and availability are still being worked out, but it's on track to be released August 2014."'

I'm the first to scoff at "diversity" nonsense, but for once I think this is a great change. America needs more girls playing with legos, if that's any hint at all they may become engineers. We're sadly behind nations like India and China when it comes to needless cultural obstacles.

In e.g. India, being a software developer for a multinational is the best paying most prestigious job you can have (like anywhere, the fact that you have a job means you can never really be upper class). Boy or girl, if you show any talent you'll be not just encouraged but pushed into the career by parents and schools. Much like parents here in some subcultures lean heavily on their kids to become doctors or lawyers, regardless of gender.

That's not the culture here, sadly. There's still a theme throughout our culture that girls who prefer engineering are doing "girl" wrong, which you don't see with doctors or lawyers.

Although with doctors, girls are often pushed to be obstetricians, pediatricians etc. Something where they will be working with women and/or children. You won't see a little girl that wants to become a penis doctor encouraged. IMO this is because women want women doctors working with themselves and their children - because the men might get some kind of sexual pleasure from it (in their minds, not in reality). I think the lawyer thing is because women want women lawyers, someone that they feel can relate to

Marie SkÃ...odowska-Curie was Polish. Her friends and family called her Panni as opposed to Madame.

This is an inappropriate nitpick. For one, the Polish word is pani. Two, her husband was a Frenchman, as was nearly her entire social circle from the age of 24 to the end of her life. While Curie did teach her children Polish and retain some ties with her country of origin, "Madame" is an entirely appropriate appelation for this woman who did all her life's work in France, became a French citizen, and served the French state and army.

No, it looks like there are three sets, each with one minifigure, but that's just what it looks like. The set is not final yet, but it's assumed there will be one "Research Institute" set with three "vignettes," each with a figure and some other model to go with it (a desk, a dinosaur, a telescope).

For example I had a friend who was selling Mary Kay products and she wanted to show off how well a product like this worked [amazon.com] and after the demo I made a comment that it worked and smelled just like Gojo [amazon.com]. She wanted to know if I would buy it and I asked how much and then said no because I can buy a gallon of Gojo for something like $15 (this was years ago)

Exactly. I think this kind of thing needs to be talked about more when people wonder "why aren't more girls going into STEM majors?", as well as other problems with STEM professions. For instance, if you're really interested in mathematics, what kind of career can you look forward to if you get a degree in that? Basically, you can help the NSA spy on everyone, in violation of the 4th Amendment, or you can work as a waitress. This country and the sociopathic companies in it don't provide good careers for

Or you can be a software developer. Or an engineer. Or a scientist. A degree in mathematics is surprisingly versatile and can get your foot in the door at some interesting organizations. My friend has an undergraduate math degree and works writing code for slot machines and other gambling contraptions. Beats waiting tables, and pays a lot better than teaching.

If you're going to be a software developer or engineer, it helps to have a real engineering degree instead of just a math degree. Yes, you can write code without a CS degree, but it's better to have the CS degree because that shows you were taught about computer science principles like algorithmic complexity, data structures, etc. and didn't just try to pick it up on your own. Yes, it's possible to be an engineer without a degree, but the degree shows you were taught engineering principles. Math is an ex

If you check out the Lego Friends [google.com] sets you will see that they now have mini-fig characters that have more shape to their body. The males and females have different body shapes and actual molded clothes. They are much more similar to Playmobile characters and now include lots of little extra parts like Playmobile has such as apples, crossaints, cups, etc. They made these to appeal to little girls as the rectangular characters didn't encourage girls imagination as much as the Playmobile characters did or some

Supposed? You just plainly CANNOT build anything out of the pieces but exactly what you are sold. Back when I was a kid Lego was far, far superior to all the other plastic toys for one simple reason: You could build whatever you wanted with them. Yes, you bought a set that was supposed to be some kind of space ship or castle, but you could simply lump them together and instead build something completely different out of them. That's what made them really powerful.

There was a time when this was true, but not so much within the past ~5 years. Can you give me a definition of what you'd call an "ordinary" brick, and what percentage of a set needs to be ordinary bricks (it's easier by piece count, but I suppose a by-volume comparison could be made) before you can classify it as general purpose? Or is there some other definition you'd prefer? Whatever it is, please make it quantitative; there are plenty of meticulously-maintained online resources we can use to determine e

I'm not sure I understand your first point. Lego sells interesting models, and the pieces necessary to build them. For castles, this means a lot of blocks that are rectangular, and some special ones for things like gargoyles and drawbridge winches. For spaceships, this means a lot of angles and greebly-bits that you can make look like engines and weapons and exhaust ports. There's not some sort of "trick" where Lego is forcing you to buy high-margin specialty pieces; people want those pieces because they le

Minecraft supplements, not replaces, Lego in the minds of creative kids. Minecraft is neat, and it lets you do a lot, but there's something special about being physically engaged with what you're building. You can't take your Minecraft creation out back to play by the stream (unless you recreate it with Legos?).

Back when I was a kid Lego was far, far superior... blah, blah, all specialized parts, blah, blah, no creativity, blah, getoffmylawn.

You know, I read this sentiment in every discussion of LEGO that comes up... And it's never been true. Never. My son is now 16 and has loved LEGO his whole life. He still get gets it out to play with now and then. When he gets a new set the pattern has always been the same -- open the box, build the model as shown, tear it apart, add it to the pile of parts and build his own things. Current LEGO sets allow every bit as much creativity as the sets did when I was his age over 30 years ago. If anyone has problems building their own stuff it's entirely due to their own lack of creativity, not because the toys somehow discourage it.

You wanna piss and moan about the specialized LEGO pieces? How about the transition from full-sized, articulated figures to minifigs? The addition of specialized round and clear pieces in the first space sets? The Technics series, which were more single-build models than just about anything today? I heard the same damn argument when each of those was introduced.

Agreed... it's true that a couple of decades ago The LEGO Group started releasing less versatile sets with larger molded pieces... and they still do, if you look at some of the train and plane sets... but they're not all like that; they release sets for varying levels of difficulty, and many sets are amazingly beautiful without those big, specialized pieces. Some trains and planes are completely brick built, and the larger sets (especially the creator sets) are very versatile. And it never ceases to amaze

I am continually surprised at how many different things my small kids can build out of even sub-100-piece sets. In the past, Lego kits came with pictures of alternate things to build, and maybe that's what you were thinking of. My kids (and friends') don't seem to need encouragement to use their imagination when it comes to building castles, spaceships, cars, monsters, robots, blaster platforms, robo-grandma, SuperPantsMan, and Frank Rock/Iron Man hybrids.

What's hilarious is that this is a post about... guess what? A non-LEGO set someone came up with on their own and submitted to LEGO Ideas to have it made into an official set. According to you, that's plainly not possible. Moreover, why don't you peruse some of the other ideas on the site (linked to in the summary), and other sites like ReBrickable. [slashdot.org]? Maybe you'd see that, while it may be true that sets have gotten more specific, your conclusion that you can't build unique things anymore is completely wr

Me and my son have. We made all sorts of things. We had 2 sets - one had a beach buggy style car (with kick ass big wheels) - the other was a motorbike (with even bigger kick-ass wheels). We made a kick-ass Trike.

Yeah - we kick ass.

The way I remember it from 30 years back is I had only a small selection of things. Blocks, roof tiles, window frames, doors and some sort of fence. Fine if you want to make a house.

You are just....stupid. As an active member of the AFoL community, I suggest you go do a Google image search for 'Lego Convention' or something similar to see all the really amazing stuff you can build with all the 'useless' bricks they make these days before you say anything else on the topic that is just wrong. There is even a subset of the community that deliberately acquires highly specialized bricks to challenge themselves to find creative uses for said pieces.

You just plainly CANNOT build anything out of the pieces but exactly what you are sold.

Several years ago, I would have agreed with you. Now it just sounds like you aren't looking hard enough, or haven't looked recently—check out the Creator series. Almost all of my newer lego collection is from those box sets, and they are very good about providing reusable pieces.

All sets produced via LEGO Ideas are limited edition. Though in truth, all sets are; you'll find great difficulty getting just sets older than a year, perhaps a year and a half, from the primary market.

Because no one will buy them, well execpt for collectors. I sold "action figures" in my video store, we would buy them by the case and maybe there would be 1 or 2 female figures in a case. These were almost always already purchaced by collectors in advance of us recieving our orders. Boys never buy female action fighures, and girls rarely buy action figures Xena was an execption girls bought both the male and female figures. If we ever had an extra female figure it sat on the shelf until some collector noti

That's the game now. If you want something, you get it when you can at a price that is acceptable to you. If you can wait, you might get a better deal but you might miss out. For many things, this is acceptable as the deal will come around again. For limited edition stuff, not so much.

If your apartment isn't safe for delivery, consider getting delivered to work. If that's not an option, consider a PO Box or a friend in a good neighborhood. Or moving.

I heard this story on NPR yesterday and they said the idea came from a 7 year old Dutch girl who wrote LEGO a letter complaining about the lack of girl figurines doing the cools things the boys figures where doing.

No? I'd much rather give my young niece a lego set that has some female characters in it she can relate to. I can't in good conscience giver her one of those disgusting frilly pink princes lego sets, and that pretty much means all the figures are male. Same goes for most other toys.

Of course an even better solution would be just throwing in some extra female heads/hair into *all* the kits and let kids assign genders as they see fit. So it costs an extra $0.05 per kit, big deal.

This... The LEGO Group has been failing miserably at trying to attract girls (well, I guess those friends sets are selling, probably purchased by dads who wish their daughters were into LEGO). The fact is, they get berated for for selling "girl" sets with pink and purple bricks, but instead of adding a decent mix of female minifigures into ordinary sets, they come up with things like "Friends," where we're right back to the pink and purple and "girl" jobs, like Vet and fluff reporter for TV (yes, she's not

In all fairness, these don't have many large deviations from existing Lego sets. Minifigs are mostly the same except for the designs on the clothes and accessories like hair (which seem to be in line with what's already been used), and most of the rest of the set is existing pieces or something very similar to existing pieces.

I came from the days before they made female looking faces with lipstick and long eyelashes. The basic emoticon-like smiley face could be male or female. The major identifier of gender was the hair. If you wanted a female police officer, take a male one and swap out the hair.

Or maybe you don't. Leave the hat on, and just SAY that is a female officer. What? Can't women wear hats? Gender was left to the kids' imaginations. And isn't fostering imagination what Lego's about?

The way I see it, this move kills creativity and entrenches the preconceptions of how a woman "should" look like more than it would encourage girls to be interested in science.

Agreed. The latest trend for "feminizing" minifigs has been to draw curvy figures in paint on the female bodies. It gives the image of a woman with a skinny body drawn on her T-shirt.

My wife is an engineer and I trained as a cognitive scientist. When my daughter was born we both fully expected her to have no interest in 'girly' things, especially as the house was already full of interesting 'boy' stuff from her brother. My wife has no make-up, a couple of dresses for formal occasions, no shoes with heels... hopefully you get the picture.

At every step she has chosen the stereotypical girl toys, the colours pink and purple, fairy stuff, pretty dresses and so on. She nagged us for make-up

I'm rather glad it turned out that way because she is popular at school and I know she won't suffer some of the cruelty my wife did as a child growing up slightly different to the other girls in her class.

I hope that's true, but popular kids can be just as cruel to each other.

Actually Lego had already licensed and sold SW products when they were going bankrupt. SW didn't save them from going under, reforming their business practices did. They cut costs by radically reducing their part pallet for example. But, you are completely right about the fact people will bitch about anything. Many people complain about the cost of Lego sets, but the price per brick has stayed at almost.10 since the 1970s.

It's true but, nevertheless, SW has been one of the best selling lines since it's introduction and, personally, while I don't like every license, I'm glad they licensed sets - I think a lot of them are absolutely awesome.

In fact, one of my favorites was this fairly simple steam engine from The Lone Ranger: Constituion. [brickset.com], I put the figures away, I just liked the train. I never even saw the movie.

I can look at that two ways... I can watch TV and it requires no thought. Or I can choose specific interesting things on politics, nature, or other sciences, and actually think about it.

So LEGO sets come with instructions, and require little thought to put the sets together the way they've laid it out in the book. That doesn't differ from how it used to be. Oh, you used to be able to just buy buckets of bricks, though! Which, of course, you can still do. The imagination happened when you took those bricks, and you took those sets apart, and made what you wanted instead of what you were told you could make.

That's the same as it is today. Why don't you visit the ideas site (link in TFS) and see where people's imaginations take them. They're not all works of art by any stretch, but some of the sets offered there are phenomenal. Also take a look at ReBrickable [slashdot.org] for other models people have created.

It's true they make some simpler sets aimed at younger kids, things with big molded pieces that "real" LEGO enthusiasts hate, but that's not representative of all that's available.

As an adult LEGO enthusiast, I actually like a lot of the friends sets... except, as the poster you're responding to pointed out, it's all pink and purple and the minidolls (as opposed to the minifigs) are terrible, IMO. At the same time, that same post made some wildly inaccurate claims... it was never the case that, given the entire "library" of sets released in any year, that it was 99% male, even given that licensed sets reflect the movies (mostly males).

I can (and do), but you're missing the point - there's a HUGE amount of variety for male minifigure parts compared to females, and because of that, often enough, the female faces and hair are often priced higher. You just don't have the variety. Now, maybe if they stuck with the basic smiley face LEGO it wouldn't be a problem... but they didn't.

Oxford, a Korean Lego clone, actually had the foresight to make sure their girls sets used the same bodies. Even their hello kitty line uses large heads attached to regular bodies.

Despite Oxford bricks being lego compatible (and as good quality wise) sadly their minifigs aren't totally the same. The bodies are slightly different. You can swap hands and heads but that's it. They are the same size though, so outside of some slightly off looking legs they can mingle